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Emily Cross

mily S. Cross is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and a dancer based at Bangor University in North Wales, where she directs the Social Brain in Action Laboratory. Originally from Ohio, she has trained in the US, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. Through her research, she uses dance, gymnastics, contortion and robots in combination with brain scanning and training paradigms to explore how we learn and perceive complex actions and how experience shapes perception, throughout the lifespan and across cultures. In her ERC project ’Social Robots: Mechanisms and Consequences of Attributing Socialness to Artificial Agents’, she addresses how experience with and expectations about artificial agents shape how we perceive and interact with these agents. A core challenge for social cognition research is to explain how we understand others. This challenge is poised to intensify in complexity and importance as the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and the presence of robots in society grows. The ‘Social Robots’ project aims to help prepare us for this future by combining psychology, neuroscience and robotics to explore the human side of human-robot interaction. Her project looks to assess how brain and behavioural flexibility toward robots manifests among young children and older adults, and across European and Japanese cultures.